Most wanted skills in 2018: Hard skills in marketing and data

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Staff Writer

04 January 2018

As 2018 rolls around, knowing which skills to upgrade and improve on would definitely be on the minds of many. According to a recent report by LinkedIn, hard skills in marketing and data will be needed most by companies in 2018. Meanwhile, soft skills such as communication will also be needed.

Jobs related to marketing made several appearances, with SEO/SEM marketing taking the eighth spot, followed by marketing campaign management taking 11th spot which put roles such as online marketing manager, digital marketing specialist, digital marketing manager in the spotlight. Mobile development also took the ninth spot, featuring jobs such as mobile engineer, mobile application developer being in demand.

The report also highlighted the demand of some hard skills relating to data management and analysis making several appearances in the ranking, with roles such as data scientists and data analyst being in demand.

To determine the hard skills in demand by companies, LinkedIn used data from its over 500 million members and identified the skills companies were “working the hardest to fill”.

Among soft skills required by companies this year, leadership came out top. This is followed by communication, collaboration and time management. According to the LinkedIn blog post, 2,000 business leaders were surveyed to determine which soft skills were high in demand. 57% of leaders surveyed said soft skills are more important than hard skills.

Here are the top four soft skills:

1. Leadership 2. Communication 3. Collaboration 4. Time management

To gather the insights, LinkedIn looked at all of the hiring and recruiting activity that happened on the networking platform between January 2017 and September 2017.

This equalled billions of data points, and identified the skill categories that belonged to members who were more likely to start a new role within a company and receive interest from companies. Skill categories that did not meet a specific threshold for membership were excluded from the analysis.